SpaceX plans to launch 30 satellites to orbit early Saturday morning (Dec. 21).
A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on Saturday at 6:34 a.m. EDT (1134 GMT; 3:34 a.m. local California time), kicking off a rideshare mission SpaceX calls Bandwagon-2.
The company will webcast the action live via its X account beginning about 15 minutes before launch.
Thirty satellites are going up on Bandwagon-2, including payloads for South Korea’s Agency for Defense Development as well as “Arrow Science and Technology, Exolaunch, HawkEye 360, Maverick Space Systems, Sidus Space, Tomorrow Companies Inc., True Anomaly and Think Orbital,” SpaceX wrote in a mission description.
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SpaceX has launched one Bandwagon mission already — Bandwagon-1, which sent up 11 satellites this past April. The company also launches other rideshare missions with a series it calls “Transporter.”
SpaceX has launched 11 Transporter missions to date. The first one, which flew in January 2021, lofted 143 satellites to orbit, a single-launch record that still stands.
If all goes according to plan on Saturday, the Falcon 9’s first stage will return to Earth about eight minutes after launch, landing vertically back at Vandenberg.
It will be the 21st flight for this particular booster, according to the SpaceX mission description. That’s just three away from the company’s rocket-reuse record.
The Bandwagon-2 mission description does not give a timeline for the deployment of the 30 satellites.